One of those Dolph movies that would have benefited from a bigger budget and better script. In fact it's kinda like an early Command Performance in the way that it has MTV style vibrant colours. Dolph would have been good to direct Detention, and it was only a year before he directed for the first time. Command Performance still ranks amongst Dolph's recent best for me and if Detention were to feature a little bit of that Dolph directing magic, it woulda been so much better.

By the way, that Chinese cover actually uses the artwork from the film SINAV which Van Damme cameoed in, they've replaced Van Damme's head with Dolph's and given him a gun - crazy!

In order to succeed, DETENTION should have been more realistic, more dramatic, and have more believable/scary terrorists (rather than pseudo techno/punk/gooffy "baddies"). It lacks stronger emotional stakes for ordinary people/high-schoolers to be suddenly in such a situation. I haven't seen THE SUBSTITUTE but seems like it was more the direction to go. The script also lacked more rewrites, DETENTION was written in 1993 (even before the other somewhat similar movie DANGEROUS MINDS with Michelle Pfeiffer) when DIE-HARD rip-offs were legion and not much has been polished since except the addition of the prologue and minor changes

The script is often an issue in Dolph movies, ironically less so I feel in some of his DTV movies after 2000. One of these days I'm gonna write Dolph a script and give it to him! Producers don't think that viewers pay attention to the script in DTV action movies, but it's often the reason they feel DTV, amongst other things. We should shoot them in the bum....